In this paper I analyze Descartes's famous thesis that judgment is under the control of the will, in the context of the current debates about the ethics of belief and deontological theories of justification and knowledge within contemporary analytical epistemology. I argue that Descartes does recognize the deontological element in justification, but this his view is not fully voluntarist, contrary to what is ordinarily thought, and that the anglophone literature has tended too much to read Descartes through Locke. Descartes, in my view, does acknowledge a passive element in understanding as well as in judgment. In so far as deontologism in epistemology is supposed to be committed to voluntarism and to internalism, it is not clear that Descartes is so committed.